Agate & Breadbox

Chapter 1. California Woman Risks Fate of Entire Human Race

An alien space ship crashes in the back yard of well-known songstress Selena Gabrielle, up on the remote coastline. She decides to nurse the sole surviving alien back to health and repair its ship to send it home. The government thinks otherwise. Whose space ship is it, anyway?

This is Chapter 1 of my new story Agate & Breadbox. Here are the other chapters, which I will post regularly.

Dead and dying aliens

Nursemaid to an alien

Sing language

Breadbox tells her story

Agate and Breadbox’s great adventure

My best friend is gone

All hell breaks loose

Quarantine. Incommunicado

My 15 minutes of infamy

Home phoned

I want my space ship back

Not that far from Zone 51

Spacegirl yearning

My space ship calls out to me

Epilogue

Chapter 1

My name is Selena, which means “of the Moon,” but I’m actually French, or French-Californian.  With my recent notoriety I’ve been called many other less flattering things, as you’ve no doubt seen in the newscasts.

My name for my visitor was Breadbox—which was quite incomprehensible to her, even though we had spent the long days of her convalescence learning each other’s language and stories.

She was such an odd-shaped entity, kind of like a rounded metal box with a parking meter sticking out the top, and an ever-changing number of pseudopods instead of feet and fingers. When I first described her over the phone, I told Sheriff Jim that she was bigger than a breadbox, and the name stuck.

She called me her gem of agate among all the infinitesimal grains of sand on the unnamed beaches of the cosmos.

I am so sorry that she was not able to return to her own people and home world. And I miss her more than I can say.

But let's go back to the beginning.

Clay and me and the Osbornes were sitting on my deck watching the sun set out over the Pacific Ocean—magnificent brilliant oranges, lavenders and greens.  My neighbor Meg Osborne was expounding on the green flash, when there was, indeed, a large flash behind the fogbank low over the horizon. What could it be?  Lightning?  A missile test? As an inveterate weather watcher, I automatically started counting seconds until the thunder arrived.  I got up to sixty before I gave up, figuring that little sound would travel more than twelve miles. 

Perhaps another minute later came the distant spreading boom, rolling at us across the surface, echoing off the hills behind, then off the higher cloud layers.  It was a very large boom of some sort.  And then, whistling over us, something hit the old cypress tree with a thwack, strong enough to knock the dead limb off, which fell directly onto my artichoke patch.  I was up like a shot, and ran back there, almost jumping over the fence in my haste. 

“What the heck flew here?” I wondered, as I looked back toward the sea.  “Was it related to the off-shore explosion we just heard?”  I gingerly lifted the dead limb from my artichoke plants to survey the damage, and to find the cause—and there it was.  As I lifted the limb, the culprit unwound and fell off onto the ground.  It was a little chain with an amulet of some piece of dull metal on it.  The chain was very fine and woven.  I picked it up and it was hot!  I got a stick and picked up the chain, and noticed it was quite heavy, like a piece of lead—or even heavier.  Uranium? Wow!  Maybe it's radioactive!  I dropped it.  My friends were gawking timidly as if they were watching the bomb squad at work.